The Gift

I just watched the movie “The Gift”, starring Cate Blanchett as a small town psychic. I just love Roger Ebert’s writing sometimes:

She lives in a swamp of melodrama; that's really the only way to describe her hometown of Brixton, Ga., which has been issued with one example of every standard Southern gothic type. There's the battered wife and her redneck husband; the country club sexpot; the handsome school principal; the weepy mama's boy who is afeared he might do something real bad; the cheatin' attorney; the salt-of-the-earth sheriff, and various weeping willows, pickup trucks, rail fences, country clubs, shotguns, voodoo dolls, courtrooms, etc. When you see a pond in a movie like this, you know that sooner or later, it is going to be dredged.

It hadn’t occurred to me until I read that review that it was that stereotypical – a tribute to the high quality acting talent (Blanchett in particular). It was rather unrealistic in that here we had a psychic who really could tell where the body was hidden (she took the police straight to it), and who eventually used her psychic powers to learn exactly how the girl had died. In reality, no psychic has ever helped police in this way. (In fact, they hinder more than they help.) No matter, I can suspend belief for a movie (as long as they’re not pretending it’s “based on a real story”), and it was a pretty good film, with a couple of things to make you jump. I’d recommend it.

The thing that puzzled me though, was how she did her predictions. She would use a pack of Zener cards and deal out nine cards in three rows of three – the resulting configuration would apparently tell her something. Of course, we’re all heard of Tarot cards, but I’ve never heard of Zener cards being used in this way. In fact, I’m sure they’re not.

Zener cards consist of five symbols, namely a: star, circle, square, cross and wavy lines (see above). They are used to test psychic ability, not by psychics, per se. They’re used in forced choice experiments: where the participant chooses the target from a set of known possible targets. For example, when testing for telepathic ability, the cards are shuffled and viewed by a remote person (the sender) who attempts to transmit the information to the receiver using psychic ability. The advantages of this type of forced choice experiment are that:

1. It is obvious if the receiver gets a hit or a miss. (If the card is a star and the receiver calls “wavy lines”, there is no doubt that is a miss – no wiggle room.)
2. The exact probability of getting a certain result can be calculated. (If you get 20 hits out of 100 tries you know this is due to chance. If you get 40 hits out of 100 tries you can be pretty sure it is not, and you can calculate the exact probability of getting that result by chance alone.)

Of course, for phony psychics (some redundancy there?), these advantages are disadvantages. When it was found that no one could beat the odds with Zener cards (without cheating), parapsychologists stopped using them, instead opting for tests that required judging, for example this type of thing:

The receiver… is "presented with several stimuli (usually four) and, without knowing which stimulus was the target, is asked to rate the degree to which each matches the imagery and mentation experienced during the ganzfeld period. If the receiver assigns the highest rating to the target stimulus, it is scored as a "hit." Thus, if the experiment uses judging sets containing four stimuli (the target and three decoys or control stimuli), the hit rate expected by chance is .25" (Bem and Honorton 1994).

If the hit rate is significantly above chance (25%), the researchers take this as evidence of psi. If not, they take it as evidence of what you’d expect from just guessing.

The subjective element makes it easier to prompt the receiver (deliberately or otherwise). In addition, because this method often requires an interpretation of the subject's verbal description, it's possible to get a hit without really picking an image specifically, just because it happens to be the one the experimenter thinks is closest. It certainly introduces a level of subjectivity into the experiment so that you can never really be sure of the true probability of getting that result by chance. I can’t help thinking that if anyone really did have psychic powers they would be able to do this with Zener cards and beat the odds.

Anyway, I just thought it was odd that they would have their psychic in the film using Zener cards. Didn’t anyone connected with the film know what they really are? Why not just have her use Tarot? Doesn’t really matter I guess, just puzzling.

Comments

[woly]

hey are you an aussie? because this movie was on tv the other night :)

[Edo]

Hey Skeptico!

Although a bit tangential to the current topic, I have to ask if you saw the recent Animal Planet show with Jane Goodall. The title was something like Talking with Animals. Whatever the title, one of hte claims on the show was that parrrots (specifically African Grey) could read the minds of their owners. No joke.

They even had a little bit where the owner would sit in a different room, 55 feet away! (please note I'm being sarcastic), and open envelopes and look at pictures on cards. The bird would then "read her mind" and talk about the picture on the card. Supposedly the bird had 27 hits out of 60 attempts (or something like that).

Have you heard about this? I can't get to the discovery channel's Web site from work (crazy firewall restrictions), but if you were to search Animal Planet with Jane Goodall, I'm sure you could find it. I'd love to read your debunking of it!

[Skeptico]

Thanks for the heads up – but I can’t really debunk it without having seen it. I’ll try to catch a later edition. It is being discussed on JREF right now.

Btw, Animal Planet website here.

[Edo]

Hi Skeptico,

thanks for the link to the discussion on JREF. Its exactly what I was hoping for. I hope you catch the edition at some point. As for the actual web site, its blocked by my hyper-sensitive company. Oh well.

[Ariel]

I can't say for sure, but I'd guess that tarot cards have more 'occult' connotations, which mainstream US audiences would be less comfortable with (witchcraft! evil!) - whereas the 'scientific' look & feel of the zener cards, even though they were being used in a totally unscientific context (who says Americans don't do irony?) would be less threatening to the delicate psyche of the viewer.